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Houses Even Bigger, Scores Way Above Average

OLD AND NEW Construction in progress on Heathcote Road in Scarsdale, where many properties in recent years have been expanded or entirely replaced.Credit
Rob Bennett for The New York Times

FOR the most part, the imposing Tudors and colonials look as if they had always been here. The only clue that some are no longer originals, dating back to the town’s first building boom in the 1920s, is the presence of large bins in their driveways, overflowing with plasterboard and worn plumbing fixtures.

With 5,200 residential lots in the 6.64-square-mile town and only a handful empty, much of the construction these days is the result either of teardowns or gut renovations. What is not being torn down or redone is often being expanded horizontally — to include a family room or a larger kitchen — or vertically, for a master-bedroom suite on a second floor. These are the kinds of features that families moving to Scarsdale today are willing to pay for, brokers say.

The median sales price of a single-family home is $1.34 million, more than double the county median of $622,500, according to the Westchester-Putnam Multiple Listing Service.

Before Seema Jaggi and her husband, Michael Daniel, a Wall Street trader, moved into a 1908 Georgian they bought in this central Westchester suburb in 2005, they wanted a major renovation.

The goal, according to Ms. Jaggi, a stay-at-home mother with three young sons, was to blend a new family room, master-bedroom suite, kitchen and garage into the existing house so that they looked as if they had always been there.

Sometimes, said Sarit Rozycki, a builder who lives and works in Scarsdale, houses are neither architecturally valuable nor sound enough to warrant a renovation. Last year, she razed a 3,300-square-foot contemporary-style house with serious leaks to put up a 6,500-square-foot colonial with pale gray-blue clapboard siding and taupe shutters, which, she said, “looks like it’s been here for a long time.”

According to Nunzio Pietrosanti, the town’s building inspector, most new construction has taken place on estate land that is subdivided, or on oversized lots, where the original house is torn down and two are built in its place. There were 12 teardowns last year and 9 in 2006, he said. As for permits for additions, alterations and expansions, 667 were granted last year and 668 in 2006.

But while many people see Scarsdale’s redone real estate as having hewed to tradition, some also feel there has been a change beyond appearances — in some ways not for the better. One such resident is John McCann, who grew up here and moved back in 1995. Mr. McCann, a vice president for sales at Fox Business Network, and his wife, Erika, are rearing a family in his childhood house, a six-bedroom 1920s colonial. “It used to be that all kinds of people with all kinds of different jobs lived in Scarsdale,” said Mr. McCann, who graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1980. “It’s a lot more upscale now, with mostly doctors, lawyers and people working on Wall Street. I preferred it the way it used to be.”

At first, Mr. McCann said, the family wanted to live “anyplace but Scarsdale.” But the quality of education available to his sons — Sean, a high school senior; Matthew, a seventh grader; and Brian, a fifth grader — lured them in.

“From a child’s point of view,” he acknowledged, “Scarsdale can seem like a lot of pressure and very competitive. But from a parent’s perspective, it’s a good education for your kids, and that’s what we decided mattered most to us.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The town is tucked in between Greenburgh to the northwest, White Plains to the northeast, Mamaroneck to the southeast, and New Rochelle and Eastchester to the south and southwest.

Scarsdale, population 17,886 in 2006, according to the census, has five neighborhoods; each of the five elementary schools bears its neighborhood’s name.

Homes in Fox Meadow and Greenacres are highly sought after by commuters who want to be able to walk to the Hartsdale or Scarsdale train station, said Shirley Schaeffer, a broker for Coldwell Banker. As in many New York suburbs, she added, “proximity to the train is a tremendous selling point.”

Greenacres and Fox Meadow also tend to have some of the oldest housing stock, because they grew up around the rail line in the 1920s, when Scarsdale became popular with commuters.

The Heathcote section includes many estate homes, some of the most expensive in the town. Edgewood has homes on smaller 50-by-100-foot lots. And in the Quaker Ridge area, generally the last to be developed, the housing stock dates to the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

The school system remains tough to beat and is clearly doing all it can to stay that way. SAT averages run more than 100 points higher than the nation’s, and the level of the high school curriculum is such that this year the faculty has begun phasing out Advanced Placement classes and replacing them with a more demanding homegrown version.

Blending with the older architecture, the Tudor-style buildings in Scarsdale’s downtown next to the Metro-North station have an old-fashioned charm.

Many residents, including Ms. Jaggi, who lives in Fox Meadow, enjoy walking into town to shop at stores like Zachy’s Wine and Liquor and the Learning Express of Scarsdale, which sells educational toys, or to enjoy Chase Park, one of the town’s many green spaces.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

The current median home sales price of $1.34 million is down from $1.445 million a year ago, but still significantly higher than the $995,500 that it was in 2003, according to figures supplied by the multiple listing service.

The median sales price for a co-op is $220,000 so far this year, compared with $245,000 a year ago and $175,500 in 2003.

Although Ms. Schaeffer at Coldwell Banker described Scarsdale as “doing very well” even in the current market, the number of sales of single-family homes from Jan. 1 to May 7 was 48, versus 92 for the same period a year ago.

The asking price for a three-bedroom one-and-a-half-bath ranch on a quarter-acre in a part of Heathcote that has smaller homes is $675,000. At the other end of the spectrum, a five-bedroom four-and-a-half-bath colonial on the site of a teardown in Greenacres, on a quarter-acre, is listed for $2.595 million.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, taxes are steep. A five-bedroom three-bath house on more than an acre in Fox Meadow, listed at $2.25 million, has taxes of $25,223.

WHAT TO DO

The recreational offerings for children were persuasive when Irene and Dimitrios T. Drivas bought their three-bedroom colonial 12 years ago.

“Especially during those weeks off from school, you don’t have to fly to Acapulco or someplace like that to make sure your children are busy,” said Ms. Drivas, a lawyer who is now a stay-at-home mother. She and her husband, a lawyer who commutes to Manhattan, have two sons: Theo, a 2007 Scarsdale High graduate, and Ianni, a ninth grader. Over the years, the boys have taken part in basketball and baseball programs run by the Parks Recreation and Conservation Department.

Working mothers like Daryl Bressler Brenner a self-employed consultant with a 7-year-old son, Jasper, also rely on the many child-centered offerings in Scarsdale, like Kids’ BASE and the Little School, a nonprofit nursery school and before-and-after-school day-care program, which provides transportation to and from the elementary schools. When Ms. Bressler Brenner travels for her job, her husband, Bradley Brenner, drives Jasper to Kids’ BASE before heading off to work as a human resources executive in Manhattan, and he can pick the boy up as late as 6 p.m.

The town has an open-air complex with four pools. There is also a six-week summer day camp at the elementary schools for children 5 to 12, said David Freedman, a parks official.

THE SCHOOLS

Ms. Bressler said that before she and her husband bought their house, they looked at test scores for a number of suburbs. “Scarsdale is a very high-achieving community,” she said, “and that’s what we wanted.”

Of the 364 high school graduates last year, almost 97 percent went on to four-year colleges. SAT averages in 2007 were 617 on the reading section, 639 on the math and 636 on the writing, compared with 491, 505 and 494 statewide.

The new homegrown Advanced Topics classes — the school is starting with social studies and visual arts — emphasize critical thinking as well as factual content, said Michael V. McGill, superintendent, adding that Scarsdale was among the first public schools in the nation to make this switch.

THE COMMUTE

The morning commute to Grand Central Terminal from the Scarsdale station on Metro-North’s Harlem line takes less than 40 minutes. The 6:32 a.m. express takes 29 minutes. A one-way rush-hour ticket costs $8.75. A monthly ticket bought online is $187.18.

THE HISTORY

Scarsdale the town became a village as well in 1916 after White Plains tried to annex the Greenacres neighborhood. According to Daniel J. Sarnoff, assistant to the village manager, the only way to prevent that was to incorporate as a village, because state law held that cities could not annex incorporated villages.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page RE11 of the New York edition with the headline: Houses Even Bigger, Scores Way Above Average. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe